While I can ask the silly ones, like why fight a demon with a stapler when you’re a core member of a coven, I really just want to know what the town’s coven had been up to for the last twenty years. We follow Howie and his small group of friends, Cory, Todd, and Ryan through each of their perspectives all book long. As a debut novel, The Cursed Among Us is an impressive, fun, spooky ride with massive universal appeal. Also the story itself was so well drawn for you with such a oh snap it felt like it was really happening!

It lagged for me slightly in the middle with repetitive gore, however, I still found myself rooting for the group of friends and hoping they'd figure their way out of the horror they found themselves in. The book started strong with a couple of friends being fond of shooting horror films themselves within a film class. One night, Howie and his friends venture deep into the woods to film and stumble upon the grave of someone. As far as characterization goes, it was interesting to see the group of friends be jealous of different aspects of each other’s lives.This is now right up there with Brian Keene's Ghoul when it comes to my favorite coming-of-age horror book. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. There’s not much to do in the small town of Newport, but they love their horror movies, and they love their film class at their local high school. He had his first story accepted in the summer of 2021 in the Books of Horror anthology, and an alternate version of the story in the Beach Bodies anthology from DarkLit Press. Durgin flawlessly captured the dynamics of a group of high school friends that weren't in the popular circle.

These scenes were wonderfully written, playing on all of the senses to really immerse the reader in the action.There were a handful of instances where I read a sentence and immediately thought “oh no…”, and a bit later, that line would pop to mind after seeing that had occurred. As crazy as it sounds, my brothers, sister, sisters in laws, nephew, daughter and husband and I, all play among us every week online. I mean, John kicked things off with: Henry Black trekked through the dense forest as dawn approached, dragging the girl’s body behind him. I don't have time to re-read books with my TBR pile being as huge as it is, but I do make some exceptions, and this will definitely be one of them. Among Us, the murder mystery game that grew so much in popularity that the sequel was cancelled, has been expanded with mods.

John describes the scenes with well and I could visually feel how putrid Jessica looked at how well he wrote. Not to say there isn’t a lot of collateral damage throughout, but it really did work to finish the story off. We rarely see her and her entire purpose is to be Cory’s prize if he survives accidentally rereleasing a demon on the town.The format of this book has two of my all time favorite things with horror stories; one, an opening that dives right into a terrifying scene before we jump to a different scene to slow things down before they ramp up again, and two, an ending that made me jump up and say, “WAIT, WHAT? With Stranger Things and Goosebumps vibes, it takes off running from page 1 and kept me interested until the very last page.